From the time I can remember, I’ve been crazy about horses. I used to ride my mother’s brooms. When I was eight, my father drove me to the big tribal corrals by the railroad tracks at Quirk, south of Paguate where the wild horses on Laguna Pueblo land were gathered and sold every two years. The Government Extension agent picked out a bay weanling colt and my father bought him for twelve dollars. The colt had a pretty head, big eyes and small ears, and the narrow chest and shoulders of the North African horses. I named him Joey because he jumped the fence around our yard like a kangaroo.
Once the excitement was over, I was a little disappointed because it would be at least eighteen months before he was old enough to ride. We kept him in the yard around the house for the first year and my sisters and I played with him and made him carry our dolls on his back so by the time he was old enough to ride, he didn’t mind having blankets or a saddle on his back.
For a long time I rode him bareback because I didn’t own a saddle but also because it was less weight for the colt to carry. The Montgomery Ward farm and ranch catalog sold saddles and I found the one I wanted. It cost sixty-five dollars. So I delivered Sunday papers until I had saved up the money. I can still remember the big box that came to the post office and the smell of new leather that filled the room when we opened it; the leather was stiff and shiny, a light tan color and embossed with rosettes; it squeaked whenever the saddle stirrups moved. I was accustomed to old saddles that were well-worn and the leather supple. I used saddle soap to soften the leather and to get rid of the squeaks. On Western saddles the stirrup leathers have to be broken in so the rider’s foot and leg fit correctly.
My father’s cousins Fred Marmon and Harry Marmon and their cowboy, Jack Kooka, teased me and said I should break in my new saddle the way the cowboys did it: they tossed the new saddle into the water trough then cinched the soggy saddle to their horse and rode on it all day.
I think the cowboys were probably right but I couldn’t bear to throw my beautiful new saddle into the stock tank so I broke it in over months, the hard way.
I was eleven and had only been riding Joey about a year when something happened. Our cousin old Bill Pratt found me on the ground unconscious in the salt bushes not far from the pen where I kept Joey. Joey was very gentle and Bill found him nearby, so it didn’t seem as if Joey had bolted or bucked. I landed on my head. I have no memory of what happened. I woke up on the couch at Bill’s house. He sent one of his sisters to tell my parents. For the next three days I was barely conscious; I don’t remember much — only how badly the muscles in my shoulders and neck hurt. I have no memory of what happened that day, of what went wrong. I remember St. Josephs Hospital and an x-ray of my skull. It was during summer vacation so I didn’t miss any school.
This might be the reason that later on when I kept horses, Grandma Lillie was always worried about me getting killed on a horse.
In 1971 I was in law school and commuting to Albuquerque from New Laguna where my son Robert and I lived with John Silko. Back then at Laguna very few people had telephones and there were no private phone lines, only party lines. We were renting the old Gunn house at New Laguna where we had goats, many cats and dogs, and of course, horses.
One morning we were eating breakfast at New Laguna (having decided to ditch law school that day) when the door burst open and Grandma Lillie rushed in; when she saw me she said, “Leslie! They told me you were dead! Killed on your horse!” I was so surprised — all I could say was that I hadn’t even ridden my horse for the past three days.
Grandma Lillie had been at my uncle’s coin-operated laundry at Laguna when some women from Paguate village came rushing over to Grandma in tears at the news of my death. A moment later Fred Marmon, our cousin, who had always helped me with my horses, arrived because he’d heard the same rumor.
Later we figured out what had happened. Grandma Lillie had a party line. About two weeks before the rumor about me, Grandma received phone calls about one of her nieces in Albuquerque whose young daughter was dragged to death by her horse after she became entangled in the lead rope. Someone must have picked up the party line and overheard them talking about it. So the rumor spread from this misunderstood overheard phone conversation.
Years later when I was teaching at Diné College (known as Navajo Community College then) I ran into Robert Fernando from Mesita village near Laguna. He worked for the BIA at the Many Farms boarding school. He couldn’t believe it was me because he’d heard that I had been killed; no one had bothered to tell him the rumor was false.
CHAPTER 13
The old folks used to admonish us to leave things as they are, not to disturb the natural world or her creatures because this would disrupt and endanger everything, including us humans. The hummah-hah stories from long ago related what was done the wrong way and what calamity to the humans followed.
The U.S. Federal Government by way of the Department of the Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs forced the Laguna Pueblo people to allow Anaconda to blast open the Earth near Paguate for an open-pit uranium mine. The tribe tried to resist but the Cold War politics fed the frenzy for uranium for atomic bombs. In the early 1950s the aboveground testing at Jackass Flats in Nevada began.
The frontispiece of Carole Gallagher’s book American Ground Zero is an Atomic Energy Commission map of the locations that got dusted with radioactive fallout during the U.S. nuclear tests in Nevada. From the map, which indicates heavier fallout with darker shading, it is clear the U.S. Government managed to nuke this country more completely than the USSR ever dreamed. All (lower) forty-eight states have locations where radioactive fallout from these tests was detected more than once, although Nevada, Utah, Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico got the heaviest contamination.
On this map, I found the Rio San Jose Valley where Laguna and Acoma Pueblos are located; it was clear the prevailing west winds followed the San Jose Valley so the clouds of radioactive particles from the Nevada atomic test site passed over us every time they “tested” a bomb. We were “down-winders” with all the other “expendable” people who became human guinea pigs.
Because I was born in 1948 I had a few years to grow before my body was subjected to the radioactive fallout. I’ve been blessed with good health thus far, but my younger sisters have not been as fortunate. They were two and four years younger than I was the first time the radioactive clouds from Nevada followed the San Jose River Valley east right over Laguna.
To add to the exposure from this radioactive fallout, once a year the Federal Government sent chest x-ray vans to Laguna to check for tuberculosis; to save a few pennies, we small children at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school were given chest x-rays at a strength meant for adult body weight, not young children.
The Anaconda Company was not required to dispose of the radioactive tailings or store them safely to prevent contamination of the air or groundwater. For years the mountain-like piles of radioactive tailings remained there, blowing east toward Albuquerque, percolating radiation into the water table with every rain-and snowstorm. No plants ever grew on the tailings though sometimes around the base of the piles, a few hardy tumbleweeds appeared. A few years ago the tailings were finally buried beneath piles of clean dirt, and now the weeds grow there profusely.
Far more egregious abuses of the people by the U.S. Government during these years came to light during the Carter administration and in the 1990s when U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary declassified millions of pages of “Top Secret” documents. A number of disturbing books were written based on the contents of the declassified papers. Handicapped children in boarding schools were secretly fed plutonium in their oatmeal, and poor black men in Alabama were secretly injected with plutonium “to see what would happen.” The aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already showed us what would happen; these demented secret experiments of the 1950s and 1960s are more evidence that anything may be done by U.S. Government agents as long as the two words “national security” are invoked.